FRED supports research on the dynamics of infectious disease epidemics and the interacting effects of:

mitigation strategies,

viral evolution, and

personal health behavior.

The system uses agent-based modeling based on census-based synthetic populations that capture the demographic
and geographic distributions of the population, as well as detailed household, school, and workplace social
networks. Multiple circulating and evolving strains can be simulated. Mitigation strategies in the framework include
vaccination, anti-viral drugs, and school closure policies. FRED supports models of health behavior change to facilitate
the study of critical personal health behaviors such as vaccine acceptance, personal hygiene and spontaneous social distancing.

FRED is available through open source in the hopes of making large-scale agent-based epidemic models more useful to the
policy-making community, the research community, and as a teaching tool for students in public health.

Funding

Support for this work is provided by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences under MIDAS grant
1U54GM088491-01 and by the Vaccine Modeling Initiative, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.